Oh boy. I am so tired of computer problems. I am writing this blog entry from my wife’s MacBook, as I am currently without a working computer. Blogging about my computer problems is a bit cathartic. You may remember my entry from early October entitled, “My four-day ordeal with 10.4.8.” I spent 28 hours over a period of four days recovering from a system upgrade failure. Well, November easily tops October for computer pain. My MacBook Pro gets fixed by Apple not once, not twice, but three times in one month. Read on…

NOTE: If you have sent me an email in the past month or so and are still waiting for a response, it’s likely due to the fact that time I would normally spend responding to emails has been spent dealing with computer problems.

I purchased the first generation of the MacBook Pro in February, and over the course of the past nine or so months, I knew that I would need to send this computer in for repair. This was Apple’s first experience with the Intel chip in a portable enclosure and problems were likely. There were lots of little problems – flaking keyboard paint, a blown speaker, and a problem waking from sleep from time to time. None of these problems were serious enough to limit my productivity, and as an AppleCare subscriber, I had three years to address these problems.

When I was in New York City in early November, I started having a problem where the computer would lock up for 5-10 minutes during which the cursor would turn into the infamous beach ball and there would be a correspondingly loud sound below the keyboard that sounded like hard drive access. This would happen sometimes 2-3 times in one hour, making it impossible to get any work done. When I returned home from New York City, I copied all my data to my kids’ iMac and prepared to send the computer in for repair. It took almost two days to copy the data off the MacBook Pro due to intermittent disk copy failure and corrupted files. Not fun.

For four days, I worked off the iMac in the kids’ bedroom. This worked mostly ok, it was just a pain not to be mobile and not have the ability to work from my office. I guess I could have moved the iMac to the office – it just would have limited my ability to work at night, as well. Apple replaced the logic board, the keyboard, and the blown speaker. I spent six to eight hours copying the data back to the MacBook Pro from the iMac. I was back online. Unfortunately, after just a day of use, the problem with the hanging system came back.

So, here I go again – I copied all of the data that changed over the past 24 hours back to the iMac, and dropped the computer off at the Apple Store. At this point, I believed the problem to be a bad hard drive. What else could it be? The logic board had already been replaced, and this would have been the most likely culprit. I could not replicate the problem at the Apple Store, but I was able to kill disk activity after running the CPU at 100% for more than 15 minutes while copying 10GB of data. This was the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I was off to Albuquerque on Sunday for a nine-day trip. I asked Apple to send the computer to Albuquerque. In the meantime, I copied my data from the iMac over to a portable hard drive so I could work off my wife’s MacBook during our trip.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I noticed that the status of my repair on the Apple website had changed to “need more information.” I called Apple to resolve the situation. It seems that the Apple repair depot in Houston, Texas, could not replicate the system hang or the disk access failure problems. Apple could not confirm that the hard drive was having problems. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Apple trying to convince them that what I needed was a new hard drive – what else could it be? On Wednesday, the computer was shipped to Albuquerque, and I received it on Friday. Apple replaced the hard drive, and replaced the logic board…again…a logic board that I had for only one day.

I spent Friday copying files back to the MacBook Pro. The insanity was over, or so I thought. This evening while preparing to upload some new photos to Flickr, I put the computer to sleep to carry the computer into the kitchen at my in-laws house. When waking from sleep, the screen was blank. I rebooted – it froze on the bootup screen the white Apple logo. I rebooted again – the screen went grey for a minute and then the much dreaded flashing folder with the question mark appeared accompanied by strange licking sounds from the hard drive. Every trick failed – booting from the repair disk, attempting to reinstall the OS, mounting the drive in target disk mode, zapping the PRAM, resetting the power management unit. Nothing. The disk is dead. Tomorrow morning, I am headed to the Apple Store in Albuquerque to drop off my computer for the third time this month. Ack!

I don’t even know how many hours I have spent on this in November – diagnosing problems, copying files, visiting the Apple Store, etc. It may be more than 100 hours in November. It has had a toll on both my personal and work responsibilities this month. This latest hard drive failure will likely result in the loss of 20 or 30 irreplaceable photos and about 4-6 hours of work. I probably won’t get my computer back until Thursday or Friday.

What amazes me about this experience is that Apple just replaced the faulty hard drive and here it fails. My first thought was that Apple didn’t replace the drive at all, but not only was the drive clean, but I believe the drive manufacturer changed when looking in the Apple System Profiler.

I remain an Apple fan, but I am starting to be persuaded that purchasing the first generation of an Apple product is probably a bad idea (I say this and then I look forward to purchasing an Apple phone, if it comes to pass). This is not my only bad experience as an early adopter.

UPDATE 1: 11/27/06: The Albuquerque Apple Store did not have a 120GB replacement drive in stock for an in-store repair, so my computer is off to the repair depot in Houston, Texas. I expect to get it back on Thursday or Friday. *sigh*

UPDATE 2: 11/30/06: My repaired MacBook Pro was delivered by DHL this morning…with a new hard drive. Another 4+ hours expected on data transfer, updates, etc.

UPDATE 3: 01/03/07: Everyone – it died again this weekend, on the way to a funeral sadly enough. The one-month old hard drive is clicking and I get the flashing question mark again. I did not make a backup since my last hard drive replacement and have lost a month of work, vacation photos, and email. I’m going to send the drive off to a data recovery service. I’m on the phone with Apple now trying to get this resolved. This situation is absurd. I’ll post a blog entry about this later.

Since Saturday morning, I have been without a computer. I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X 10.4.8 and after rebooting, I had a kernel panic. I rebooted again – another kernel panic. I was hosed. During the weekend, I tried various reinstallation techniques, but my install DVD kept hanging at various parts of the application installation process (first iWeb, then GarageBand, then iMovie, etc.). After searching the discussion forums, I discovered that I was not the only person with this problem. By Sunday night, I had tried ten variations of the reinstall – all failed. It seems as though the MacBook Pro install disk 2 (the one with the applications), does not like to install over the top of an existing system, even if you move the Applications folder out of the way. I tried and tried – no luck. This is not good news if it happens again before Mac OS X 10.5 is released.

Monday morning, I camped out at the Apple Store. My solution? Buy a Mac OS X 10.4 install DVD since I suspected that my installer DVD was bad. The problem is, Apple doesn’t sell Mac OS X 10.4 for Intel Macs because every Intel Mac has shipped with Mac OS X 10.4! This all lead to the dreaded final option – backup the data, format, reinstall, and copy the data back. With a 120GB internal drive in the MacBook Pro, this means hours and hours and hours of work. As I already spent hours and hours and hours over the weekend trying to reinstall, this made the process even more painful.

So, I bought a 500GB external hard disk, and connected it to my kids’ iMac along with my MacBook Pro in target disk mode. Copying over 100GB of data off my MacBook Pro took forever due in large part to copy failures thanks to corrupt and/or locked files. I’d have to identify the problem files, remove them, and start again. Hours and hours were lost throughout Monday as I sat in front of a computer and stared at the screen, waiting for the copy to fail, and for me to identify the problem files before starting the process all over again. My Monday night, I had finally backed up my data and I was ready to format and start over. By 2am early Tuesday morning, my MacBook Pro was operational again, and I have spent all morning (after a short night’s sleep) copying my data back to my MacBook Pro.

Total time spent recovering over four days: 28 hours. I am not kidding. Had I given up the reinstall on Sunday and had jumped right into backup and format mode, it would have only been a total of 18 or so hours. By the way – 10.4.8 installed just fine the second time. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. I blame no one. It happens. It still sucks, though.

It’s voting time for My Dream App. You are allowed to vote for up to 14 of the 24 ideas on the list. First round voting ends on Friday and the bottom six will be eliminated before entering the next round. I need your vote. That is, if course, if you like my idea.

VOTE NOW!

Three weeks ago , I visited My Dream App, and submitted three application ideas for the contest. Over 2,700 ideas were submitted by a thousand or more people from around the world and I was one of lucky 24 to be selected as a finalist. My selection was announced today. From here on out, there is a multi-round elimination process with public voting, akin to American Idol. To learn more about the contest, take a look at the about page. I am excited!

You can read about my idea, Telepath, here and my first blog entry on the MyDreamApp blog here has even more details.

If you don’t know what the Apple ‘iTV’ is, take a look at the Engadget posting: Hands-on with the Apple iTV prototype.

Steve Jobs at the ‘It’s Showtime’ event: “But there is one last thing that I’d like to talk to you about today. Now this next thing is a little unusual for us. It’s a sneak peak of a product that will be announced in the first calendar quarter of 2007. We usually keep things pretty corralled until we’re ready to ship them but in this case, I think it completes the story and to understand where we’re going I’d like you to get a sneak peak of this. So we decided to go ahead and show it to you today.”

My Translation: “Guys – you know that we never, never, never, pre-announce products. There is an important reason why I am doing this today. You see, I’m having a tough time getting the major studios to buy-in to our online movie pricing plan. They have this notion that an online movie should cost almost the same as a DVD, which is totally bogus. They see digital movie sales as an opportunity to increase their margins, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the big DVD sellers like WalMart and Target are putting pressure on them. CD sales are way down – we’re already the fifth largest seller of music, regardless of the distribution format! The reason that Amazon was able to launch with everbody, basically, is their pricing structure. Go take a look at it and tell me why the !@#$ you’d buy a digital movie from Amazon for almost the same price as a DVD from WalMart? Plus, have you checked out their user experience? Boy, does it suck. And, it’s Windows only, don’t forget about that. The way to get the major studios back to the table and accept our consumer-friendly terms is to expose our movie product roadmap to the public, and get the consumers on our side. The major studios will come around, just you wait and see! Why would you buy movies anywhere else with the tight integration between your computer, your iPod, and soon – your television? We’re going to achieve market dominance with movies, just as we have with music and television programs. Get out there and talk up the iTV and make it known that you want to buy movies from us. Then, and only then will you be able to buy ‘Failure to Launch’ for less than $16.87 online! We’ll see if it’s even worth $9.99 – I have my doubts. By the way – you know, we’re going to have to pre-announce our iPhone next year, as well, because of the damn FCC filing period.”

I learned about Apple’s release of Boot Camp from the show floor of LinuxWorld Boston. William Hurley (”whurley“), the CTO of the open source company Qlusters, called me and told me to check out Apple’s site. Down below the big advert for the iPod Boom Box was a link to Boot Camp – Apple had finally embraced a Windows installation solution for Intel Macs. There were rumors all week about virtualization technology in the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 release. Alas, Boot Camp is the virtualization solution we had hoped for, and may actually be a sign that virtualization is not in the cards for Apple (at least anytime soon). Boot Camp does allow for the installation of Windows XP on Intel Macs, but you have to boot into Windows XP, not run Windows XP within Mac OS X. This is not ideal for me, but I’d take the support anyway.

I was already planning to install the WinOnMac solution – the outcome of a hacker contest to boot Windows XP on an Intel Mac. During the contest period, the prize money for the winning solution passed the $12,000 mark. The only problem was that the installation process was complex – something like 40+ steps, and I had to send my MacBook Pro back to Apple for repairs. I don’t think they would have appreciated a boot loader menu while diagnosing the computer at the repair center.

whurley and I looked around for a Windows XP installation CD to have our own “Boot Camp install party” during LinuxWorld. Surprise, surprise – Windows XP installation CDs are not easy to find at a Linux conference. There’s something amusing about guys getting excited about installing Windows on a Mac at LinuxWorld.

The following day, my brother emailed me a link to Parallels. I had heard a few days prior that Parallels was planning to release a Mac Intel version of their virtualization product. Rumors were rampant that VMWare was planning an Intel Mac release, as well. I didn’t think much of the link to Parallels, as I assumed it was just a heads-up on the future release, which I knew already. Later in the day, a friend (Jeb Bolding), IM’ed me and asked if I had seen the video of Parallels running on an Intel Mac. I had not. I assumed it was an early preview from the developers, but Jeb proceeded to tell me that a public beta had been released. Woah. Parallels must have been reacting to Apple’s release, and did not want to miss out on the media hype.

I am typing this blog entry on the airplane from Boston to Dallas, and am almost done with an installation of Fedora Core 5 on my MacBook Pro. Performance, at least during the installation process, is screaming (update: Fedora Core 5 performance on my MacBook Pro was better than on my PC!). This is nothing like virtualization I’ve ever seen on the Mac before. Virtual PC on my PowerMac was slow, QEMU (in its current incarnation) was even slower. MacTel by the shady OpenOSX company, known for its lack of attribution when repackaging the Fink project codebase for resale (can you say ‘open source license violation’?), took over eight hours to install Windows XP on my kids’ Intel iMac. I gave up after the early attempts in February.

I plan to install Windows XP in the next few days. From what I saw of the video, performance is fantastic.

The reality is, there are times when we need to run Windows applications. For some, this is Outlook, for others it’s Internet Explorer. For me, it’s the need to have a Windows testbed for open source projects. I don’t want two computers. I am highly mobile, and am dependent upon my MacBook Pro. If it doesn’t work on my MacBook Pro, then I’m not going to use it. With Parallels Workstation, Linux and Windows will have a place on my computer…finally. In fact, multiple Linux installations.

PS: Virtualization is just one step closer to my ultimate goal – to launch Windows and Linux application within the Mac OS X Finder. The Darwine project is aiming to do this. Until Darwine is consumer-ready, I’ll be using Parallels Workstation. That is, unless Apple actually does include virtualization technology in Mac OS X 10.5. I have my doubts now.